While there may not be chiseled rock tablets with SEO commandments, there are certainly deadly search engine optimization sins. While you won’t risk eternal damnation by breaking them, you are putting your online marketing efforts at risk. This article will take a look at 7 mistakes people commonly make. Avoid these mistakes and you will see your SEO efforts pay off more quickly and effectively.

1. Static HTML Website – Yes you can still rank on the search engines with these, but a CMS or blogging platform like WordPress makes it so much easier. Besides the fact that Google generally ranks WordPress sites higher, they are also much easier to add content too. Google loves content!

2. One for One Reciprocal Links – This is an old school method of link building and it has definitely lost its luster. Google caught on to this method and developed updates to their algorithm to make these fairly ineffective. If you trade a link with someone, they basically cancel each other out. They can still be good for traffic, but not for SEO purposes.

3. Not Updating Your Site – Remember Google loves fresh content. If content is fresh it will be counted as more relevant. Google wants to bring its users the most relevant searches it can. An article about new cars written today is more relevant by nature, than one written 5 years ago.

4. Submitting Sites to Search Engines – For the most part there is only one search engine you care about – Google, so why bother submitting to the other ones? In fact there is no reason to submit your site to Google either. All of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo/Bing) are smart enough to find your site. They will usually do it relatively quickly too. Search engine submission is a waste of time.

5. Same Title Tag Across Site – I see this so often. A business website will have the same title on each of their web pages, and usually it is the business name. You want to use keywords here, and you want to make sure that each page has a unique title tag so that they can individually rank in the search engines for different terms.

6. Keyword Stuffing – This is another tactic I see way too much, and I can’t believe it still happens. Writing your content with tons of keywords stuffed into it is not a good idea. First off, Google has been around for awhile it knows what keyword stuffing is and if your ratio is too high it will penalize you. Secondly, it is horrible for your readers. Write for your readers, not search engines.

7. Duplicate Content – This has always been an issue, Google tries not to rank two pages that are very similar so if your content is all duplicated from elsewhere you might be in trouble. Even worse news is very recently Google further tweaked its algorithm to make sure sites that were built entirely with duplicate content, or were full of useless content would be dropped from its rankings. It is estimated that around 12% of the Google rankings were affected.

While you won’t risk eternal damnation, you still need to avoid these deadly SEO sins. While you may not face Biblical consequences, you will face low Search Engine Optimization rankings and potentially risk being dropped from Google altogether.